


The First Great Poem (even the furies would weep)

by sousverre



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Dad Max is a difficult mentor, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Magical Realism, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Psychopomps, and ALLCAPS DEATH, because Important Life Lessons and Important Death Lessons require talking, echoes of the Abhorsen series, not just flailing hands and bestowing gifts of dead animals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-04-09 12:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4348823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sousverre/pseuds/sousverre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max doesn't want to lay his ghosts to rest, but he's still a pilgrim of that black river, and a registered guide to the Dark Desert Beyond. He's lived for a long time. Death is short on reliable staff.</p><p>And Capable - well, she's in the mood for a career change. And if she walks into Death with a guitar and a pocket full of songs... maybe she can make a way for someone who's passed into Death to follow her home.</p><p>If Max can keep her from looking back. </p><p>
  <i>A post-movie magical realism/mythology AU.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. speak of what you have lost

**Author's Note:**

> It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk  
> On the shores of the darkest known river,  
> Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks  
> And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;  
> Then to the great court with its marble yard  
> Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there  
> In the sunken silence of the place and speak  
> Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,  
> And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,  
> Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,  
> The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything  
> Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,  
> As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,  
> Against the water's will, where all the condemned  
> And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,  
> Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled  
> Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled  
> Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,  
> To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light ...
> 
> \- from "Orpheus Alone," by Mark Strand  
> [ X ](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182870)

_(It was an adventure much could be made of)_

* * *

 

 

Max catches the baby.

Capable hasn't seen a birth happen like this before. The room is light and beautiful. The Dag has gone into another place, her eyes rolled back wild and feral, but there aren't any tubes or knives or straps, just the gentle hands of her sisters around her. It seems like a beautiful, natural thing. There is only one man in the room, and he kneels and catches the baby.

Capable, the ever-watching, witnesses Max's hands catch the awful, wonderful thing as it slips from the mother. It is an impressive catch. The thing is slimy, slippery and completely surprising - Capable herself would have dropped it in horror. People scream as it drops, but _there_ \- Max catches it neatly, as if he has midwifed a hundred times. It is not a pretty object - gruesome as a war trophy.

Max slaps it, which seems admittedly unfair.

Almost everyone misses it, but Capable sees. There's a bloody rope connecting the thing to the Dag, but there's also an invisible rope connecting it to life, and as he slaps the baby Max hauls on this, reels it in, until the thing in his hands just fills up with _spirit._ The thing takes its first breath, and turns from a piece of wax-smeared organ meat into a living breathing person, and the spirit inside it breathes and screams. There is one more person in the room. Capable's heart stutters with the sheer power of it, filling her up like she's taking her first breath too.

Max returns to his grim vigil between the Dag's knees, and Capable is wondering what he's hoping to see there - where her sister is all naked and torn, and there is shit, and wouldn't anyone prefer to look at the baby? - and then she sees Max, blood-streaked and resigned, take delivery of the placenta.

Capable is horrified and curious. She sees the baby, beautiful now, washed and laying on the Dag's chest. She sees the light come on inside the Dag, her pinched face made luminous and more beautiful than it has ever been. She sees the bodies of womanhood closing around the mother and baby, as Max steps back and erases himself.

She sees all of these beautiful things, but she thinks about the invisible rope.

She decides to corner him in the bathing room, where he is sitting on a bench, rubbing the remains of Dag-and-baby from his body with a bowl of water and a towel.

"You caught a lot of babies then?" she asks later, taking a seat next to him in the bench. He startles, staring at her from behind some cloudy Max-reverie, and she repeats the question after his eyes clear.

Max indicates that a few babies have indeed passed into the world through his hands. Not a great many, mind you, but certainly more than one. He does this by deprecating one eyebrow and rocking his palm from side to side, brushing the exact number of babies away dismissively with the back of his hand.

"Why?" Capable asks.

Max looks alarmed and sketches a complicated shrug. Capable translates this as "While I, Max, personally do my best, there is only so much fuckery I can supervise at any given time, and despite my efforts to instill wisdom in this universe of pain and dust, people do continually insist on having babies, so while I claim no responsibility for the results, I am still consistently called upon to cope in these trying circumstances. What else can I, Max, do but catch the baby? You want me to drop it, Capable? You want me to _drop_ the babies?"

(She puts a lot of imaginary words into his shrugs. It costs nothing and amuses her.)

"It gets. Y'know. Easier," he says aloud.

"It looked awful."

"Not as hard as - hm. _Having_ the baby."

Capable hums companionably. Max goes back to scrubbing himself down, dipping the piece of towel into his bowl and wringing it out. The water in the bowl is rusty-stained and smells as familiar as a monthly cycle.

"What was the bit with the _other_ rope?" she asks finally. "The one the others couldn't see."

He startles again and she shifts aside on the bench to give him room. He makes an interrogative noise.

"The bit before it breathed, when you - when you put the air into it."

"Ah," he sighs.

"Yes. That. You - you pulled on the air and made it live. What was that, Max?"

He drops the towel and looks at her for a long time. Then he tells her, but he does it without words, offering her the answer as a helpless shrug and something cupped and released from his empty palms.

 _Work,_ she understands without words, but what kind of work it is she doesn't know.

 

* * *

 

 _(It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk_  
_On the shores of the darkest known river,_  
 _Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks_  
 _And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck_  
 _Then to the great court with its marble yard_  
 _Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there_  
 _In the sunken silence of the place and speak_  
 _Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,)_

* * *

 

 

Capable is eminently practical. It is, in fact, a defining character trait. That night, she makes up a little blanket roll and goes up to Furiosa's rooms, where she lays down in front of the door.

 _Work,_ Max had told her, helpless and wordless, but it wasn't an answer. And she saw, too, something he hadn't meant to tell her - that he was listening to that ineffable, mad, Max-inner-voice that was telling him it was time to leave. The Dag's baby was properly caught and bound into life. He never liked being in the Citadel anyway. Furiosa would be angry, but she needed to know she couldn't rely on him being at her side. And now Capable had caught him out too - seeing something he hadn't meant to let slip.

Max doesn't like to be caught.

(It is, in fact, a defining character trait.)

Capable's a quick study, and Max isn't really that complicated. He's just a little strange and broken, but that doesn't mean she isn't listening.

So when he tries to slink oh-so-silent and no-goodbyes from Furiosa's rooms in the dead of night, Capable reaches up and catches his ankle. And, well, of course he isn't going to make a noise, not while Furiosa is stirring in her sleep, already reaching out for where Max isn't - Max doesn't like to be caught - so he huffs in annoyance and interrogates her with a sarcastic eyebrow.

Capable indicates that her pillow is, in fact, a neat roll of her possessions, and that she is all geared up and ready to go.

Max rolls his eyes politely.

Capable uses Max-language to show that her pillow is wrapped around a comfy core of pure shotgun.

He shifts his weight.

Capable, well into her stride, silently implies that the tangled hellcat fury of Furiosa is only one slightly raised voice away, and that Furiosa is much scarier than Max, and that Capable thinks it would be very funny to sell Max out - that, in fact, Capable would almost rather do that, just for a laugh and to punish Max for being such a sneak-out schlanger - but that she might be convinced to keep quiet and follow him nicely, if Max is polite.

It is a virtuoso performance. Max is grudgingly impressed. She knows this because he says "I am grudgingly impressed," silently, by dropping one shoulder.

She pads triumphantly behind him as he leaves the Citadel, slipping behind him as he makes his escape, the shadow of a shadow, the ghost of a ghost.

She and her shotgun call shotgun, and sit next to Max in the Interceptor as they draw away from home.

Max doesn't talk with a lot of words, but snatches of stories start to flow out of him as they pull away from the pillars of stone. His eyes, clearing of madness, reflect in the rearview mirror. It's clear that he's thinking of Furiosa. It's clear that he needs to leave. It's unclear what he thinks that leaving will do. Capable can almost hear the whispers that dance around his head like flies.

He puts his foot down until the stone towers are small in the rearview mirror.

Capable judges the time and space to slip in a question, sliding it like a knife between his ribs. A knife in the ribs can kill, or sometimes even heal.

"What's back there? What's in the Citadel that you don't like?"

He answers, "Ghosts."

 

* * *

 

_(And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,_   
_Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,_   
_The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything_   
_Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,_   
_As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,)_

* * *

 

"So, ghosts?" she asks the next day. Max has been a real gentleman on this trip - tongue silent and shoulders glowering, but he'd just handed her a lizard in a very chivalric manner, so she knew it wasn't entirely her that he was mad at.

("Nobody's ever given me a lizard before," she'd said graciously, before biting its heads off. Max's good behavior should be rewarded, she thinks. She'll make a special effort to do so - maybe she'll even return him to Furiosa half-tamed.)

By way of an answer, he waves away the invisible flies around his head.

Capable frowns, leans forward as she chews. She waves uselessly at Max's head too. He recoils and looks at her like she's the crazy one. She rocks back on her haunches, finishes her lizard, reconsiders. Then she lunges forward, a knee landing in Max's lap, arms flailing wildly at the space around Max's head.

Max, frantic, eyes wide, paddles uselessly and grunts at her. It is clear that he doesn't want to hurt her or risk accidentally touching a sexual part without permission, but is also abundantly, hilariously clear that he has no idea how to not-hurt people, and is also a bit sketchy on which parts Capable might consider sexual.

The images move like flies, but they're a bit more like heat-haze - mirages that ripple the hot space around Max's head. They are also invisible. Capable finally catches one, slapping it between her hands like a mozzie and screaming when it burns her.

The thing screams back and her head fills with the image of a woman, whose face is both beautiful and also an empty skull, who is both beckoning and pushing away, who is both alive and dead. Memories not her own. There is blood and pain and an entire story - and love and pain and -

 

_Love Max_

_Max                    ?_

_who_  
?  
are

_you  
girl_

_Max_

 

"That's a ghost?" Capable screams at Max.

"No," he grunts, taking it away from her and releasing it to join the cloud around his head. "Sort of."

"What is it?"

"Memory."

"That's not a memory, it's a sodding _nightmare_!" she screams. She scrabbles to her feet (Max winces as she clambers over his lap in her boots) and kicks at some sand.

"Ghost memory."

"Ghost memory?" she shrills. "Ghost memory? That's the best you can do?" She runs up to him, kicks his ankle, and scoots back. "What the hell, Max? What the hell?"

He spreads his hands at her - she reads his gesturing: "You're the one who grabbed it, Capable, you're the one who came out here with me, you're the one poking at an overheated engine and then complaining that you got yourself burned."

"Can you see them?"

"All the time."

"Can others see them?" she asks.

"No."

"Do I have any?"

He squints at her and rocks a palm back and forth in the air. _Kind-of,_ he says with his hands.

Her stomach drops, skin crawls, head fills with terrible visions of skulls and reaching hands. "Joe?" she quavers, a hand drifting up to touch her neck.

He shakes his head violently. "No ghosts of Joe," he says aloud, very firmly, a complete sentence.

"You're sure? How can you be sure?"

"I put 'm down."

"You put Joe's ghost... down?"

"Mm. Had to." He nods, dropping his chin like a guillotine. "Won't come back. Not ever. Can't."

"What does that mean?"

"Buried him," Max says.

Capable remembers when Max disappeared the first time, slinking away through the crowd as she and the rest were raised up. He had gone out into the desert for a long time, and had come back eventually with the Interceptor. Had he been burying corpses out there in the wastes? Putting ghosts down?

"But Joe was torn to pieces," she falters. A fragile corpse, skin tearing like rotten fabric, rendered into bits and parts by the hands and fingernails of the Wretched, carried off - how could Max find and bury a thousand festering pieces? Why would he want to?

"Mm," Max admits, "Made it hard."

The very logistics of Capable's vision - of reassembling an old man for burial from scraps of flesh torn by a crowd - crowded out all of her other questions - "How did you find all the bits?"

"Didn't bury the bits," Max says, looking at her again like she's the crazy one. "Buried him. The - the _soul_."

"Can't come back from the Fifth Dark River," he adds.

"Made it hard," he says, "Souls like having the bits. Lots of bits, torn up, that makes it hard to put a ghost down. 'S why, in the Before, when you got a saint, you'd tear them up for bits, keep the bits, make pictures of 'em, make up stories about 'em, keep their name around...

"That kind of thing," Max interrupts himself, mouth twisting, "Gives a soul something to hang on to. They stay around when we hang on..."

Capable sits down hard. She narrows her mouth and eyes and stares at Max. She's sure that a heat haze has formed around her own brain, from all the thinking that she's doing.

Logistics is cramming thousands of questions to her brain, but Capable's got a big heart - a big kindly heart - and she sees a space for a question, so she sets it out gently:

"Who was the woman?"

"'S my wife," he mumbles. Guilty, relieved.

"And you're hanging onto bits of her, aren't you, Max?"

She sees a space for some comfort. She puts her hand on his hand.

"I'm hanging onto bits of people too," she says.

 

* * *

 

 _(Against the water's will, where all the condemned_  
_And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,_  
 _Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled_  
 _Furies, for the first time, would weep,)_

* * *

 

 

So Max can put down ghosts. He tells her a little about it. A few words every day. She starts to notice when he's seeing his ghosts, when they're shouting at him. She doesn't see or hear them, not the way he does, but she's starting to notice the spaces they leave.

In the same way she notices the space he is leaving for Furiosa, the Imperator's stamped afterimage gleaming slim and tall and terrible at his side, just in front of him, like a heat shimmer. He's riding shotgun to her living ghost. Capable's heart aches for him. At least the ghost in her own heart was dying anyway, and is now safely dead.

Max's heart bleeds out around her in invisible images, at the corners of her eyes. They are so strong and vivid that they teach her how to see.

He tells her, falteringly, that she was already sensitive, that she already had in her eye the capability to see. Next, he says, comes something else - but he falls speechless again, showing her again his empty palms, and whatever invisible metaphorical thing he's trying to hold out for her.

If he stays in the Citadel long enough, she thinks, then how much would his visions bleed out? How many others would start to see ghosts?

"I don't understand," Capable says. "These are your ghosts, you can just put them down - why don't you just lead the poor things to rest?"

Max turns away from her, and in the set of his shoulders she reads his thoughts: _Because then they'd be gone,_ and then-

and then she sees the ghost

and then

and then she hears the bikes -

* * *

 

 _(and the soot-filled_  
_Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,_  
 _To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.)_


	2. put in its place the world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,  
> Which was followed by days of sitting around  
> In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes  
> Closed, trying to will her return, but finding  
> Only himself, again and again, trapped  
> In the chill of his loss, and, finally,  
> Without a word, taking off to wander the hills  
> Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken  
> The image of love and put in its place the world  
> As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure  
> Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,
> 
> \-- Mark Strand

 

 _The problem is, sugar, the human head can only contain so many thoughts. Used to be any traveler could meet really_ old _people, sometimes even out on the Road, and they’d have something to say, but it would always be like talking to somebody from a different country. The world they came from is lost, gone, salted over - nobody speaks their language any more, you're talking to each other through mirrors and glass._

 _You get old enough, sugar, you'll get to an age where you’re holding so many stories that they’re holding_ you _together.  
_

_(Oh, I think you'll get there. Be forgiving when you do.)_

_All those fissures and cracks in the meat of the brain, packing so full of all that layered, wrinkly memory that the pressure starts to grind the weaker thoughts to powder. So old people crack, or detach, or go mad or vague, or just let the bits they aren’t using flake away._

_Some things do hold fast even as the body fades around them: memories kept under glass, the red dress, the smell of the mother’s clothes, the hospital room, the boy lost in the war. But there is only so much data that a human can hold before the information erodes in the grasp, like clutching a handful of sand. Ever done that, child? You clench the fist tight and it drains away faster – you’ve got to hold it like water. Try it next time you grab a handful. It takes a lot of life experience to hold onto sand, which is an excellent lesson._

_Even a youngish man in his thirties can hardly reach back to lay his fingers on the pulse of his nine-year-old self, and the fifteen-year-old self is as alien and remote in his wants as a total stranger. That’s life, sugar, that’s how it goes._

_And that’s why the immortals go a bit mad. They can’t help it. The human brain isn’t built for that much love and effort and memory. They let go. They have to. They survive. They only keep those hard bright bits (That red dress – nearly everyone has one of those) and as the cup continues to fill, even some of those drain away. So people who have lived too long piece together those hard bright bits into something like a backstory, but by God do they lose a lot of years between them. You can’t remember all those years. It’s like holding sand._

_There I am now, rambling on. You’ll have to forgive me, sweet child o’ mine. I’m terribly old myself and you can see what that does to a mind._

_And I’ve got a good excuse; the second oldest thing in the world, me._

_What's that you say? Yes. I hadn't forgotten._

_We were talking about Max._

 

 ==

 

They’re three days away from the Citadel, three days deep into trackless red wasteland when Capable hears the bikes approaching. The faint engine noises scraping like a saw against her nerves, she realizes she’s been waiting for this. 

 

She’d followed Max the way she’d once followed Furiosa – pragmatically, curiously, inevitably, as if following a lighted path. 

 

(She tries not to think too hard about it, but it’s true – even in the bowels of her darkest moments, she saw the bright thread of the future somewhere ahead, a lighted golden road leading up and out. She didn’t kill herself – she followed it out of the pit instead;  and she didn’t die, and she followed Furiosa, and she found Nux, and she followed it to Max, and she’s got to trust that it will still work out, even in death and blood and fear…)

 

But the past few days, with Max and his ghosts, have made Capable realize that he actually has no idea what he is doing. He’s following his own lighted path, and it only makes sense to him, and there is no guarantee that Capable is a safe passenger.

 

Capable’s world divides neatly into enemies and allies, so while her heart is stuttering with fear, she is shakily checking the shotgun. Max simmers beside her, oddly comforting in his surety. When the bikes come to kill Capable, Max will punch them until they are dead, or he is dead, or both.

Reliable, Furiosa called him. He is that.

 

But now he’s only simmering, and listening, and not doing much in the way of preparing for a fight. Capable feels a spring inside her winding up tighter and tighter, her body pumping the turbo fuel of apprehension.

 

“Sounds like three of ‘em, Max,” Capable prompts. Her voice tightens, nearly shrilling.

 

“Four,” he grunts. He’s scowling with his head tilted, listening with no apparent urgency.

 

“What a helpful comment,” she says – he appears to miss the sarcasm.

 

“Friends,” he says finally. “I think.”

 

“You have friends?”

 

Max flicks a scowl at her – repressive, yet also saying _I’m as surprised as you are._

 

“Hands up,” he mutters.

 

“Are you mad?” she shrills, before remembering the very clear answer to that question. She dithers, nearly running, her eyes seeking the surety in Max’s stone-carved face.

 

“Hands up,” he says, matching words to action, leaning back against the baking-hot black metal of the Interceptor and crossing his legs ironically at the ankles. Capable looks at him and suddenly realizes why half of his visits to the Citadel end with Furiosa throwing spanners at his head and screaming the air blue.

 

“Fine,” she says. “Fine.” She lays her gun at her feet and watches the plumes of red dust drawing closer.

 

The tension makes her muscles ache. Max opens a disreputable penknife and excavates a large piece of something from his teeth, examines it thoughtfully, and eats it again.

 

“That’s so rude,” she says, to drown out the blood singing panic-songs in her veins.

 

He blinks and offers her the knife, politely, handle towards her like a gentleman.

 

“Not what I meant,” she says, and the three bikes crest the dunes.

 

Capable doesn’t recognize them. They’re not the mud-red Rock Rider bikes, nor the Vuvalini’s slim ragged machines. They have a lot of faded blue cloth and feathers tied around them. There are four people – one machine carries two riders. The person riding pillion on the third bike has no legs and their arms are wrapped around the waist of the one in front. The people are muffled in quite a lot of blue cloth wrapped around their faces, but they don’t seem to be going out of their way to appear gruesome and  terrifying, which Capable thinks is a nice change.

 

“Buzzards,” Max says laconically.

 

“Mad Dog,” says the lead rider. “And who’s this?”

 

“Red.” Max inclines his head to Capable.

 

“We can see that,” says the lead rider, taking off their helmet to reveal a worn, strained-looking white person of indeterminate age and gender. They appear to have most of a dead bush strapped to their bike for some reason, but Capable doesn’t judge. “Thanks for coming out. We’ve got some time, but not much.”

 

Max flicks the air dismissively, which Capable translates as meaning that this phrase is used so often that it’s all worn out; there is never any time, he gestures, and you’d think that people would understand this by now and plan their lives accordingly.

 

“He means we’ll come,” she translates for the rider’s benefit. She might not know exactly what is going on, but Capable prides herself on her ability to navigate social situations.

 

The rider nods. “Follow Crop and Tercel. We’ll cover the tracks.” The leader’s face disappears behind the swaddling helmet, and they kick their bike into gear.

 

Capable picks up the gun and scrambles into the car. In the Interceptor’s much-abused wing mirror, she watches as the two bikes behind her cover their tracks. The bush strapped to the leader’s bike and the cluster of taped-together brooms on the other bike are put to a rather clever use – they’re unslung and dragged along the ground, blurring and obscuring whatever marks their tires have left.

 

“Nice idea,” she says aloud.

 

“Hn.” Max puts the car into gear, following the bike with two riders. “Doesn’t work, though.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“In’t natural. You ever see a bush runnin around outside, messin up tracks?” He shakes his head. “Good tracker, they’ll think, uh, well, we’re either tracking quarry  or… a, a real _clever_ bush.”

 

She blinks at this unexpected display of Maxian humour.

 

“Hey.” Capable nudges Max with her shoulder. “It was three bikes,” she points out smugly.

 

“Four riders,” he counters.

 

“How can you hear a rider?”

 

He makes a silly face.

 

“You’re so obtuse.” She pouts, propping her feet on the dashboard in that way he doesn’t like. “Did you hear their… like, their souls or something? Is that a thing you can do?”

 

“Sure,” he says. “Same way I’d track a real clever bush.”

 

“But you said – how?”

 

Max nods and wiggles a finger around his ear significantly, indicating an overheated brain.

 

This isn’t funny at all, but Capable suddenly remembers her own father, gone a long time now, and how desperately painfully un-funny his jokes were, but she’d laugh all the same, so she finds herself laughing now, mostly against her will. The apprehension that’s slowly draining from her body makes her laughter shrill and crack. The tight band of muscle around her stomach hurts with it. In the driver’s mirror she sees Max’s eyes cut across to her with a flicker of something like affection – ephemeral as a heat shimmer over hot metal. She laughs herself into hiccups, then sobs, then rests her forehead against the filthy window and watches the pillars of dust from the bikes ahead.

 

“Where we going, Max?”

 

His big blunt hands are steady on the wheel. “Where the Road sends us.” Capable hears the capital R.

 

 ===

 

The Buzzards have an actual real – is it? It can’t be. Capable boggles at it openly, checks Max’s reaction, then stares at it again with carefully narrowed eyes.

 

“It’s an airplane, right?” she says in an undertone as they get out of the car.

 

“Hn,” he nods.

 

“Does it – can it fly?” She tries to sound casual.

 

“Could do.”

 

“Nnnnrgh,” Capable says, stomping ahead in her boots. If only Toast were here, dear curious blade-sharp Toast, who shared Capable’s affection for the pictures of the airplanes in Miss Giddy’s books. Such a shiny idea, airplanes. Much better than cars, which cling so dustily to the ground.

 

This one is a lovely beast, pegged to the ground with ropes but still shifting on her tires like she wants to move. Streamers of tattered blue fabric trail from her wings and tail. She is a very small, rather rusty airplane with a snubby little nose, and Capable falls in love at once. She walks towards it, entranced.

 

“Come in,” croaks a voice above. Capable looks up and sees that the cockpit – windows hung with faded blue fabric – has been made into a little nest. She looks back to Max and the Buzzards, and he gives her the go-ahead – a flick of the fingers – safe. She climbs up carefully, stepping onto the ‘plane’s slippery little wing and hoisting herself into the tiny, dark space.

 

Inside there is the oldest person Capable has ever seen. A small, dried-up little brown bird of a woman who wrinkles her face into a marvelous leathery smile and introduces herself as Mother Goose. She is still beautiful and smells faintly of urine. Capable doesn’t know what she expected.

 

The little ‘plane rocks on her tires as Max hauls himself up.

 

“There’s a sight for sore eyes, a scruffy mad fucker,” Mother Goose croaks happily in a voice like a rusty hinge. “Cor, look at ‘im.” A bony elbow drives into Capable’s ribs – it’s like being poked with a broomstick. “If I was a few thousand days younger I’d ride him again just for the fun of it.”

 

Capable blinks.

 

Max hums a smile. The heat haze of that vague, alarming affection shimmers across his face. He squats by the ancient woman in her nest and she scrubs the bony claws of her hands into his shortish brownish hair.

 

“My lovely boy.” Her breath whistles in her lungs. She touches his face like an old lover, cupping her withered hand against his stubbled cheek. “You were such a lovely boy. Mad as a box of fucking snakes. But then,” she adds, “so was I. Come to take me home?”

 

He nods, covering the hand on his face with his own.

 

“Good-o,” she crows. Then, for a second, she’s serious: “I’m glad it’s you.”

 

He jerks his head at Capable. “And Red.”

 

“Learning the ropes, is she? Good to see young people taking an interest.” The elbow prods Capable sharply in the ribs again. “Don’t take too much of an interest in this one, missy. It all ends in tears. Waste of water.”

 

“I won’t,” Capable promises, more shocked than when the old lady alluded to riding Max. “It’d be like fucking my dad.”

 

“Too right! You told her how old you are yet?”

 

“Thought you were supposed to be dyin,” Max grunts.

 

“I’m the one who’s dying, I get to decide how it’s done,” the old woman declares. “And I find you partickly refreshing company. Maybe I’ll recover.”

 

But her voice does sound fainter.

 

Max jerks his head at Capable. She draws near and sees that the golden cord is back in his hand. Just like the one that bound Dag’s baby. Just like the one that she sees that pulls her towards the future. He’s holding Mother Goose’s life in his hands, Capable realizes with a sick squeamish feeling, like that one time when a War Boy got scalped and she saw his brains. He lets go and then twists it again more slowly, so Capable can see the trick – it’s something in the wrists, she thinks. At his nod, under the old woman’s benevolent stare, she kneels down and tries as well. It doesn’t work but she sort of sees the trick of it.

 

“Two choices,” he tells Old Mother Goose.

 

“Live or die?” she says charmingly.

 

“Fast or slow.”

 

“Fast,” she decides. “I don’t like waiting.”

 

“Now?”

 

The old woman gestures imperiously, and Capable obediently pulls away some of the cloth covering the windscreen. Mother Goose cranes her neck and looks down at the Buzzards on the ground for a while, then up at the sky. “Now,” she says. “Before I stall out. I’ve already said my goodbyes.”

 

Max kisses her on the forehead, pressing his lips against her for a long silent moment. The old woman begins to cry and tremble. Max gropes for Capable’s hand and holds it very firmly.

 

“I’m scared, Max,” says Mother Goose.

 

“You done good,” he says roughly, drawing both women close. “Time to go home.”

 

And the river is upon them before Capable has time to scream.

 

===

 

Water!

 

“Wooo-eee!” squeals Mother Goose. The rest of the world is meaningless, unparsable noise. Cold. Rush. Grab. Stumble. Water. Max’s hand in her own, slippery, muscles stretching as she fights to keep her grip on him, the only thing she’s sure of. Her boots skidding for purchase against slick rock, the water grabbing and surging around her hips. Bitter water in her mouth. Water! The noise! The weight!

 

Capable chokes on water (water!) and staggers across the flow of current until she’s plastered instinctively against Max’s side. She’s never been in water like this – in fact, her brain is still processing the fact that there is such a thing as water-with-hands, water-with-push, water that grabs and gropes and has a mind of its own. And the sound – nothing like waters spilling from pumps onto rocks, which used to be The Most Water In the World. This – this is Water that IS the World.  Blinded and breathless, she supports herself on the short stocky bulwark of Max. He is as implacable and unmoving against the current, like the red rock of the Citadel, roots planted deep.

 

It’s singing water – talking water. Come along, Capable, it laughs. We’ve been waiting for you. Run along with us, Red, come on and see. Oh, you’re grown so beautiful, and we haven’t seen you in so long… She lurches sickeningly forward.

 

“Max,” she says desperately. He has Mother Goose tucked under one arm. The old lady is nearly up to her shoulders, whooping and laughing.

 

“It’s like riding the rapids,” she caws.

 

“Max,” Capable says more urgently, stumbling and coughing and clinging, her head full of rivers. “Max, it – it knows me –“

 

“’S’alright,” Max grunts, taking careful steps across the current, his hand firm around hers.  “’S’alright, Red. You’re not dead.”

 

“I’m not?” Capable gains her footing. The river’s voices change, losing their grip on her, their words turning into meaningless music. “I’m-“

 

“I’m not dead,” she says, and looks around.

 

The River – somehow deserving of a capital R – is beautiful.

 

It stretches around them, vast and playful, roaring up suddenly into white-tossed frills, night-purple and black, like the night sky but surging. A river of spilled ink, heavy as dark blood. And it runs through what looks and feels like a cavern, some great ceiling arching high overhead, but it’s not made of rock – more like the underside of a car – pipes and artifacts and plates and rivets, set with points of twinkling stars. The River tastes bitter but not unpleasant, and over the smell of (water!) there are rich, spicy smells that the nose wants to drink in even as it flinches from them – acrid and intriguing, notes of wine and turpentine. And it’s singing – singing to Capable alone, calling her in voices she once knew by half-forgotten names. Not as strongly as before, but calling her. Achingly, lovingly, in the voices of the dead. The taste of salt in her mouth is tears but the bitter taste is River. She reaches up, feels for her goggles, and pulls them down over her eyes for a little privacy.

 

“What is it?” she breathes.

 

“Back gate,” Max says, grimly plodding against the teasing flow of the current.

 

“If I’d known death was this beautiful, I’d have come long ago,” says Mother Goose, reaching around Max to poke Capable. “Look at the fish!”

 

“Fish?” Capable has only read about those in books.

 

“Don’t look at the fish,” Max says, his shoulders dropping to indicate that he feels like an imperator in charge of a squadron of toddling War Pups.

 

“So where am I going, then?” Mother Goose demands.

 

“Island first.” Max sets off crosswise to the current, seemingly unmoved by the pleas of the water.

 

The island is small. The sand is milky white with occasional blue stones. Capable eyes the ruined temple with sort of column/pillar things and wonders why it looks familiar. She lets go of Max to wring out her dripping plaits.

 

“Ready?” Max grunts.

 

“Really?” The ancient woman claps her gnarled hands. “One last dance?”

 

Max reaches up and tugs at one of the shimmering heat-haze madnesses that glimmer around his head. His eyes flick to Capable and she watches carefully as he twists something invisible in the sky, gathers it up and drapes it around all three of them.

 

This time, her gasp is pure delight –

 

===

 

The music hums like honey. Beautiful people dance in the smeary golden light.

 

Capable takes a seat at the edge of the room and drinks it in with all of her senses. Fairy lights sparkle in the arms of the most beautiful trees Capable could have imagined. The night air smells impossibly sweet, fragrant with some heavy scent like a woman’s musk, like sex when it feels good. Wondering, Capable traces her finger along the face of a drooping flower. A flower grown just for beauty; the Dag could tell her what it was. The skin of the petal feels like – like the softest parts of a man, but cool, perfect, desiring nothing. She presses the petal between thumb and forefinger and it bruises. What a frail, delicate thing.

 

The music hooks her in the ribcage. She wants to dance. She smoothes the impossibly beautiful fabric of the sparkling dress over her knees and watches the dancefloor. She’s read books. There are rules here to observe.

 

The other dancers are faceless. Not in a gruesome way. They just don’t have faces – they’re blurry, half-sketched - and when they talk to each other it just sounds like “Hrabble burble bibble.”

 

Mother Goose, young, supple, her hair untouched by grey, dances in Max’s arms. She is lit from within and as beautiful as the flowers. Young, her beauty a little more apparent because she likes the way she’s wearing her own strong youthful body, she laughs raucously, head tipped back. She looks a bit like Furiosa in the clear lines of her face and neck, though her build and colouring are more like Cheedo. Odd how these distinctions are lost with age.

 

Capable watches them sway. Mother Goose is crying freely, but it looks like those good cleansing tears that wash the eyes. Max isn’t a great dancer but he stays in one place and sways with a kind of grim determination, and he’s clearly so fond of the woman. The lights blur and dance, and the music warbles with mumbled words half-catching on the ear.

 

Capable feels a little surplus to requirements. She accepts the hand of a faceless dancer and allows herself to be swayed around the little dream-garden. She can dance a little – she used to dance with Angharad, Toast’s light hand on the piano tinkling in the background. As if to oblige her, her faceless partner’s clothes turn to white muslin and their hair loosens to brown-blonde curls, and Capable dances with Angharad’s memory, happy herself for a while, knowing all the steps.

 

The edges of the garden are blurred, and beyond the little circle of fairy lights the River presses dark and fast. Capable rests her face on the shoulder of the memory and lets her tears dry there. The memory holds her nicely, swaying to the dream-music.

 

“Oh, Angharad,” she murmurs.

 

“Bibble,” the memory says gravely, stroking her hair as they rock back and forth. “Nurble nooble, Capable,” and Capable feels a little bit forgiven, a little farther from a sister dying underneath the wheels, even though technically the words weren’t there.

 

Max’s memory – or his madness – is good on the sensory details, but it’s still limited, Capable thinks. He got the flowers – strong and real as anything – and the feel of this dance, this time, this place. This is around the time when the World Ended. When there were pretty flowers, and music, and people wanted to dance.

 

She’s fitting the pieces together. Max is old, that much is certain. Old as the end of the world, old enough to dream most convincingly of decorative flowers and music from another time.

 

He’s an agent of death somehow, and he killed Mother Goose, and she’s watching the last dance the woman will ever have. Capable wonders why she isn’t surprised or even afraid – maybe because the dream and the dark river have unmoored her; maybe because Max is trustworthy if you don’t ask too much of him, and because he has dreamed such a fine dress for Mother Goose, and because his ghosts are so terrible, and because he remembered to make the flowers real enough to bruise.

 

She wonders what her own memory is like, staring thoughtfully at her dance partner’s blurred-over face.

 

“Could you be – him?” she asks. The memory hesitates, becomes taller. Wonderfully tall, in fact, and it sketches a fine impression of white paint and a sculpted torso – it’s very clear on the particular masculine fineness of the torso – though the decorating scars are floating and hazy. Perhaps because Capable’s own memory isn’t clear on the finer details of engine diagrams.

 

Capable doesn’t think that Nux could ever dance in his life, but she lets his memory spin her, the face blurred but good enough, his big strong fingers lacing through hers, a fragment of something desperately sweet and wanted and gone, passing like flowers.

 

When the dance ends, Max and Mother Goose find Capable outside the pool of yellow light, shredding a fading flower between her fingers.

 

“Boat’s coming, Max,” she says edgily.

 

“On time.”

 

The black boat approaches, tacking across the current, piloted by a tall figure shrouded and cloaked in black. It grounds itself on the white-sand beach with a hiss.

 

“Boat,” Max says graciously, loading Mother Goose into it.

 

HAVE YOU GOT THE FARE? The ferryman asks. GOING TO TRY FOR THE SENIOR CITIZENS’ DISCOUNT?

 

Max glares.

 

NO FARE? BLOODY TYPICAL, says the ferryman. THIS ISN’T A CHARITY, YOU KNOW. THIS ISN’T A BUS SERVICE.

 

“It’s been lovely, Mad Dog.” Mother Goose kisses him on the cheek and settles her skirts around her on the seat.

 

“Yeh,” he mutters.

 

DONE WITH YOUR MOMENT? The ferryman says. ONLY THERE ARE PAYING CUSTOMERS WAITING AND WE’RE SHORT-STAFFED, AS YOU BLOODY WELL KNOW. PSYCHOPOMPS, they address Mother Goose, PSYCHO-POMPOUS ARSES MORE LIKE, NEVER BOTHERING ABOUT THE ADMIN. THE STORIES I COULD TELL.

 

“Mad Dog is lovely,” Mother Goose says equably, “But let’s have my death be just about me.”

 

CERTAINLY, GRACIE. The ferryman bows a cloaked head. YOU LOOK LOVELY.

 

Mother Goose waves. Capable twinkles her fingers. The ferryman's back bends to his pole, and the boat slides off beyond the yellow light, as silent and wheel-less as something pushed across a pane of glass with a finger. Boats are quite lovely, Capable thinks. They're a really good idea.

 

“But that wasn’t Death,” she says with certainty.

 

“Charon,” Max grunts, looking over her shoulder.

 

“What does he do?”

 

“Ferryman.”

 

“I see.” The last of the dreamy yellow fairy lights fade, leaving the world shaded in purples. “Where is she going?

 

“Third Gate. Admin and admissions.”

 

Capable frowns. “Third?”

 

“We came in the back.” He grabs her arm. “And now we have to go.”

 

Max tugs her into the River, and they stumble together into the cold rush.

 

“How do we get back?” Capable asks, slipping and sliding on untrustworthy stones.

 

“We run.” He matches words to actions, or tries to. She catches his urgency and stumbles faster. It’s more than urgency – fear, perhaps.

 

There's a rushing noise, as big as all the world. "Big wave coming, Max," Capable coughs as the spray builds.

 

He looks at her, eyes wild and white all around the edges.

 

“Max?” Capable tries.

 

 _“̸C҉om͏e͜ ͠ho̵m̢e n͘ow,̕ ̨Max,”̕_ say the voices in the River, curling around them, dragging Max down, pulling him away.

 

 

===

_And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place_  
_Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept_  
_The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,_  
_And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,_  
_And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain_  
_And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light_  
_Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing_  
_Rose from its depths and shone as it never had._  
_And that was the second great poem,_  
_Which no one recalls anymore...._

[[x](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182870)]

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my beautiful, sweet and gentle beta, Robin Trigue, who suddenly bravely reminded me of this story. Robin, I am grateful for your belief, for your energy, and for your spirit.
> 
> And thank you to you all - yes, you, especially you. I can't promise to be good, and I can't promise to be here, but I promise I am grateful that you stopped to listen.
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinTrigue/pseuds/RobinTrigue

**Author's Note:**

> I struggle painfully with Writing Anxiety, and writing fic has been helping. Your comments and kudos are treasured. I apologize if I don't reply right away.


End file.
